Quote from: Neshm hiKumala;1049854The "Jade Arch":

Chirine, did you ever use it or get close enough to it to almost (have to) use it?
Records mention that the machine has become "skewed" with age. Its mind control capacities are thus less reliable. Is there some anecdote or story behind this statement, one that's not recounted anywhere?

Been to see it, never had to use it. The OAL pretty much keeps it under very tight guard.

Not sure. The thing is an artifact of the Ancients, which meant in Phil's campaign that you simply didn't mess with it unless there was a dire emergency. I'm sure that the setting have 'drifted' with time; supposedly, the Temple of Gruganu knows how to run the thing, but I would'nt trust them as far as I could throw Avanthar. See it used; it's like a 'walk-through' MRI unit. No obvious effects from being through it, but you supposedly become absolutely loyal to the idea of a central government' in short, one becomes loyal to the Imperium and not to who is sitting on the Petal Throne. So, people who go through it are those whom the OAL deems useful for the preservation of the state, and they don;t worry a lot about any side effects - supposedly, about one in every 100 people who go through it have their minds wiped or go insane.

I didn't go through it - I'm genuinely loyal to the Imperium as a concept, which was a pretty radical notion for the players in the original group. Which was one of the reasons  why we split, actually; my group had 'gone native' pretty early in the campaign.

Does this help?

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1049931Been to see it, never had to use it. The OAL pretty much keeps it under very tight guard.

Not sure. The thing is an artifact of the Ancients, which meant in Phil's campaign that you simply didn't mess with it unless there was a dire emergency. I'm sure that the setting have 'drifted' with time; supposedly, the Temple of Gruganu knows how to run the thing, but I would'nt trust them as far as I could throw Avanthar. See it used; it's like a 'walk-through' MRI unit. No obvious effects from being through it, but you supposedly become absolutely loyal to the idea of a central government' in short, one becomes loyal to the Imperium and not to who is sitting on the Petal Throne. So, people who go through it are those whom the OAL deems useful for the preservation of the state, and they don;t worry a lot about any side effects - supposedly, about one in every 100 people who go through it have their minds wiped or go insane.

I didn't go through it - I'm genuinely loyal to the Imperium as a concept, which was a pretty radical notion for the players in the original group. Which was one of the reasons  why we split, actually; my group had 'gone native' pretty early in the campaign.

Does this help?

Yes. It does help. Thanks for all the great details and clarifications on what one become loyal to once the machine has been used.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1049931Been to see it, never had to use it. The OAL pretty much keeps it under very tight guard.

Not sure. The thing is an artifact of the Ancients, which meant in Phil's campaign that you simply didn't mess with it unless there was a dire emergency. I'm sure that the setting have 'drifted' with time; supposedly, the Temple of Gruganu knows how to run the thing, but I would'nt trust them as far as I could throw Avanthar. See it used; it's like a 'walk-through' MRI unit. No obvious effects from being through it, but you supposedly become absolutely loyal to the idea of a central government' in short, one becomes loyal to the Imperium and not to who is sitting on the Petal Throne. So, people who go through it are those whom the OAL deems useful for the preservation of the state, and they don;t worry a lot about any side effects - supposedly, about one in every 100 people who go through it have their minds wiped or go insane.

I didn't go through it - I'm genuinely loyal to the Imperium as a concept, which was a pretty radical notion for the players in the original group. Which was one of the reasons  why we split, actually; my group had 'gone native' pretty early in the campaign.

Does this help?

Yes. It does help. Thanks for all the great details and clarifications on what one becomes loyal to once the machine has been used.

Quote from: Neshm hiKumala;1050032Yes. It does help. Thanks for all the great details and clarifications on what one becomes loyal to once the machine has been used.

You're welcome!

There's a page on my blog about the campaign prospectus I'm handing out to people about a proposed Tekumel campaign that people would like me to run. Discussion has been very lively, like at today's painting workshop, and I've also posted some of the questions on the blog as well.

Thoughts and comments always welcome!

Quote from: Neshm hiKumala;1050032Yes. It does help. Thanks for all the great details and clarifications on what one becomes loyal to once the machine has been used.

I think my reply got eaten; you're very welcome!

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1050101There's a page on my blog about the campaign prospectus I'm handing out to people about a proposed Tekumel campaign that people would like me to run. Discussion has been very lively, like at today's painting workshop, and I've also posted some of the questions on the blog as well.

Thoughts and comments always welcome!

Only comment: gonna find a way to move in your neighborhood very quickly to hopefully join your game! It sounds great.

Question: how are you going to "crunch" the numbers if people come with PCs created with different rule systems? (if I understand how you're running things).

Quote from: Hermes Serpent;1049574Benefit of being retired mate, plenty of time to write material and tart it up for running at cons.

Think I've got at least four sign ups then, you, Pookie and a couple of others who've mentioned they'll be wanting to play.

The game was played on Sunday AM UK time, 6 of us + Hermes Serpent himself. It was nice to get into a room with 6 other people and talk about Tekumel in general, as well as run through the scenario with (many!) side excursions into important questions such as who got to organise the shamtla collections, who loaded the pots onto the Chlen carts, and who got to fight the Shanu'u...

It did make me wonder if there is a possibility of a one day UK Tekumel get-together being viable. Even if it was six or seven people in a pub somewhere...

Thanks to all those who were there.

A not too brief run down of the three scenarios I ran at the UK Continuum convention last weekend. Thanks to all who played in any of them.

This past weekend was Continuum, a UK convention that's held at the University of Leiceester every second (even) year. It's been running for a number of years and it has in the past been very focussed on Chaosium products. There's always been a large number of Call of Cthulhu games, Gloranthan games and Pendragen games as well as the usual selection of other settings and systems. With teh new Glornathan Runequest release and the 5.2 version of Pendragon these game systems/settings have seen a fresh resurgence.

The convention runs from around midday Friday through Sunday evening although many participants stay over and leave on Monday morning after a final session on Sunday evening. My buddy and I travelled up from the South coast on Friday morning leaving at 9:30 to avoid the rush hour traffic we struggled north via clogged roads as many schools had finished making Friday the first day of the Summer holidays. We arrived just in time for me to throw myself out of the car (not bothering to unload or sign in to the con) and rushing to my first game. It was an Openquest scenario written by Simon Bray and run by Tom Zunder. We had great fun uncovering the significance of the toad god and the strange attraction between the very beautiful women and the very ugly men of the village.

After getting my bag from the car, checking in a  and having something to eat I sat down for game two. After 10 minutes I found out that it had pulled from the schedule so I headed for the bar.

Saturday morning I had an OSR game picked out. Now Saturday morning was only a three hour slot and the  GM had way more material than we could deal with in the time so it got short-circuited to get us to the finale. Several dead characters and two raving PC sorcerers who wanted to rule the world later we broke for lunch.

Saturday afternoon I ran the Wolrd War Cthulhu scenario I'd previously run at Chimeraides where the PCs are French Resistance fighters tasked with finding out if a local Vicomte has a certain book. Much mayhem later they left the Vicomte's home partly burned down and escaping in the priest's coal gas powered car they got stopped at the Milice checkpoint. Four persons in the car and a risng pall of smoke behind them tipped off the troops. The Chanteuse failed to hide hide her pistol and then shot one of the two Milice dead and wounded the other. As the rest of the Milice squad piled out of the hut the priest pulled his Sten from under his robe and cut down the rest of the troops. The two other partisans came across the bodies strewn across the road later as they had to walk home.

Pacing myself I spent Saturday evening in the bar and readied myself for Sunday morning. Sunday featured my Bethorm Tekumel game and the sign up sheet gathered a group of hardened fans. You know that game where the players know more than the gm and make his life hell. Well it wasn't like that at all.

The members of the Glory of the Worm clan set out to discover why the Glass Spear clan had not delivered the necessary amphorae to contain the year's crop of Dlel fruit brandy. As this is a starter type scenario I introduced a Slaver on the trail to add aspects of Tekumel culture slowly to players without any prior experience. This is designed to  work as an alternative to the fresh of the boat option for new players.

The characters arrived at the village/administrative centre and saw three Shanu'u flying  above them and hunting for something edible. They prepared with a priest who cast Invisibility on them while they shot at the single Shanu'u who stayed behind when the other two departed, It landed and as the Invisibility wore off the clan guards took on the beast ( A ploy to introduce combat gently). They soon had it in dire straits before one priest rushed forward to attack it with his chlen dagger. The player then found out why you don't rush into combat as a priest. The result of Shánu'u 1 Party 0 soon turned into a 1 all draw. The locals came out of hiding and got the chlen carts loaded up and the party was pressured into killing the other two beasts.

With the amphorae on the way the party climbed up to the cave where the Shanu'u laired. Finding the cave empty but showing signs of ancient occupation they prepared to fight the Shanu'u. By now they had found out the best combat options were to get the clan guards fighting the beast in a bottlenecked area to reduce the number who could engage the party and then proceed to use the Bypass Armour option to improve the damage from one or two points a round each to lots more. One Shanu'u fell to a blow to the head that stunned it and it's mate took a death blow.

The party explored the cave and found it was an old, very old temple to Sarku and ominmous slithering sounds from the depths caused them to choose to report it for a potential reward.

The players had fun, the rules got tested and approved (only one player had used them before) and the scenario was deemed to be suitable mainly unchanged but with some tweaks for a introductory style game.

Final game of the con was a rerun of a Mythras scenario where I have some Greek heroes end up on Monster island in a very Harryhausen movie style game. As usual one cannot put a golden chalice and some gems on a temple altar without someone in the party choosing to try and take them. The Ice Worm Guardian of the Temple of Raylimshaitan and Actinius the human guardian proceed to damage the party and send them fleeing before the drums brought native lizardmen who demanded a return of the stolen goods. The party limped back to Port Grimsand with a single wild boar skin as their 'winnings'. One of the players was the translator of the German version of Mythras material and we had an interesting discussion about the difficulty of translating the Greek material in Mythic Constantinople as German and English use different transliterations of Greek letters.

Quote from: Neshm hiKumala;1050135Only comment: gonna find a way to move in your neighborhood very quickly to hopefully join your game! It sounds great.

Question: how are you going to "crunch" the numbers if people come with PCs created with different rule systems? (if I understand how you're running things).

Thank you! I'm hoping to get the game room on-line in the near future; we have all the technology, I just need time to hook it all up. I'm starting out slowly, this time around, and avoiding all the mistakes I made with my previous game group. Although it did last over a decade of game sessions, I made some bad mistakes at the very beginning and they helped kill the group off at the end.

You are correct. The short answer is that I am very, very good at running probability curves in my head and on the fly. If I know how relatively good or bad the situation is, I can do the math very quickly and generate the probabilities for anything. I did this for over a decade in my old game group, which had PCs done in EPT, S&G, and BESM. We had the same situation in Phil's campaign where we had EPT and S&G PCs in the same game sessions, so I guess I'd have to say that it's something I'm used to in my gaming.

The long answer is that I don't much obsess over game mechanics in general. I've been around for a while doing this, and I have enough practical experience and research under my belt to get the job done in a game (it's 'Free Kreigspiel', if it needs to have a name) and it seems to work just fine for people who play in my games. I've been told on more then a few occasions on-line from people who have never played in my games that this is all wrong - "too loosey-goosey, too much hand-waving" - which is why I've stopped participating in the various 'ODD' and 'OSR' forums that I've tried over the past decade. I have no clue what most of the gaming discussions on the Internet are about, so I don't participate in them any more.

I don't particularly mind being way off in the nether regions of gaming; our original TNG was much the same. We gamed with Phil and published shelves full of stuff, but we also constantly got lots of letters, phone calls, and  face-to-face complaints about how we were not in the 'mainstream' of gaming and that Phil and the rest of us should change our ways - we were doing 'BadWrongFun' long before the Internet came along, and it didn't seem to matter a lot to us at the time. Or in the present, for that matter, as some of my colleagues from that group and time and place are going to be part of this campaign.

That's my explanation for what I'm going to be doing; I'm sorry that it's put in such a simplistic form, but I don't know a lot of big academically correct words for what I learned how to do all those years ago and still do.

Sorry about being long-winded; we had a long discussion about this this past weekend at the workshop session.

it sounds like you people had a great time, and I wish I could have been there! I'm also sorry to have missed the dates, too, and I'll be dealing with that.

Quote from: d(sqrt(-1));1050155The game was played on Sunday AM UK time, 6 of us + Hermes Serpent himself. It was nice to get into a room with 6 other people and talk about Tekumel in general, as well as run through the scenario with (many!) side excursions into important questions such as who got to organise the shamtla collections, who loaded the pots onto the Chlen carts, and who got to fight the Shanu'u...

It did make me wonder if there is a possibility of a one day UK Tekumel get-together being viable. Even if it was six or seven people in a pub somewhere...

Thanks to all those who were there.

The UK can scene is quite crowded with something on many months of the year  - my own current schedule for 2019 is Revelation at Sheffield in February, Seven Hills ditto in March or April, Hydriades in Switzerland at the beginning of June (not attending Expo next year), FreeRPG day mid June, The Kraken in Germany in the autumn and maybe Dragonmeet in December.

However a Tekumel meet looks like a great idea. I'm near Southampton/Bournemouth on the South Coast, other folks were from London, Newcastle and the Birmingham area but a possibility is a meeting at Spaghetti Conjunction 20 October at Geek Retreat not far from the main train stations in the middle of Birmingham and with a car park close behind the site. As it's a one day con it might be possible to run a game there quite easily, more so than a random pub and then have a Tekumel chat before or after the game.

People might be keen on a London meet - what's the pub not that far from Borough Market that has RPG groups that meet there? I've been in on a day up in London but forget the name.

I'll post on FB and the Yahoo list to see  if there are people there who might want to have a meet.

I'm in Oxford so not too far from most of those places. Looks like Spaghetti Conjunction might clash with Kraken this year though.

Yes, I'm at the Kraken but I'm just one person and if there's interest I'd say go for it. Pookie suggested the SC 's format of 'pitch your game on the day for open signup' might not work well for a Tekumel game. I've previously looked at the possibility of running a small (40-50 people max) con in Winchester as it has good train frequency (takes about 1 hour) from London so that might work for a one day event. I'll talk with Pookie about how Geek Retreat Birmingham is set up and if it could host a small 10-20 person Saturday meet for a Tekumel group game and/or chat in addition to their usual programming.

Oxford is obviously fairly central but has, I believe, parking cost issues probably necessitating Park and Ride options. Any other possible location ideas?

Talk has been ongoing and Pookie has set up an event on FB for a TekUKon at Games Retreat in Birmingham probably for 6th October (confirming with them tomorrow).

I've offered to run a three part introductory scenario using Bethorm that I've written (and run) two parts of so far. We're very open to others running games or people just coming along to learn more about Tekumel. We hope to have about a dozen of so people attending to talk about Tekumel and gaming therein.

Might have to hit Chirine up for a presentation on the Professor's Opus Magnus that we could use as a looping intro to Tekumel for newbies. Anyone know of a YouTube presentation that talks about EPT/Tekumel that would be good for an intro as an alternative if he's too busy?

It's amazing what a little effort can do to enthuse a core base of fans. I've run three Tekumel games in two years and played one, been lucky enough to get other enthusiasts involved, had the Foundation give a little boost and now we're trying something more mainstream that has really taken off, resonating with those UK people who have run Tekumel games in the past and who have very fond memories. Someone contacted me who had run a recent campaign with his group (used Pathfinder but I wont hold that against him) so increasing our profile has been a good thing.